What Happened to Our Love of Beauty? How We Lost the Aesthetic Sense and How We Regain It

On April 9th, 1917, French artist Marcel Duchamp submitted a piece he called “Fountain” to the Society of Independent Artists, and thereby commenced a retreat from millennia of human culture. The urinal, simply signed “R. Mutt, 1917,” was an implicit challenge to all previous conceptions of art, beauty, and aesthetics. Rather than reflecting the ideal, drawing one outward and upward, it reflected the dingy yet objectively real nature of everyday life. Duchamp had started a trend that then accelerated throughout the 20th century, suffusing art, literature, architecture, advertising, and clothing. Utility overtook beauty, and originality overtook tradition. There were myriad causes for this major cultural shift, but one need not look far to recognize its effects. Dilapidated houses and dull office buildings line our streets. Netflix reality game shows outsell cinema. Drill beats and autotune pump through the headphones of nearly every student walking on college campuses. The loss of beauty in our culture is not something that happened to us – we are actively killing beauty and its remnants day by day.

Our society is killing beauty because we’ve lost our “aesthetic sense.” That is, a receptiveness to the goodness and beauty that ultimately opens the soul to transcendent beauty itself. To lose the aesthetic sense means to lose thousands of years of human culture and creation. Before you turn your nose up at the snobbish notions of “fine art” and “tradition,” let us first consider a world without man-made beauty – a world in which the things humans create only reflect the visible reality, rather than the invisible ideal. What remains? Not much. Money? A Marxian sense of industry and efficiency? Without the existence of and an appreciation for an aesthetic human culture, life dulls, and we perceive our imaginations as enemies of the “real world.”

Here lies the importance of the aesthetic sense: it measures the gap between what we know to be beautiful, and what gives us enjoyment to interact with. It could be expressed in a crudely generalized formula: (A) Beauty – (B) Enjoyment =  (C) Aesthetic Sense. The closer (C) is to zero, the greater one’s heart aligns with one’s head. The aesthetic sense, crucially, is not found in one’s ability to recognize beauty (nearly everyone can do this), but in their degree of appreciation or enjoyment of beauty. It is one’s receptivity to the recognized beauty. 

I conducted my own study (riddled with statistical biases, admittedly), presenting students with two pieces of either art or music – one classical piece I’d consider beautiful and the other a generic pop song or an NFT. The subjects unanimously agreed on which of the various two pieces I presented were more beautiful. This suggests we have maintained our ability to recognize objective beauty.  More interestingly, though, I found that all but one of the dozen people I questioned derived more enjoyment from interacting with a piece of art they believed to be less beautiful than another. (A) was significantly larger than (B), and (C) was far from zero. Our sentiments are wildly misaligned with what our intellect knows to be beautiful, and it doesn’t take a study to see it.

What is behind this gap? One likely reason is that there are far fewer examples of beauty around us to inspire us to study and create beauty. Much of the ugliness we see today is a remainder of the 1960s, a time when brutalist architecture — with its simple, hulking concrete structures – replaced neoclassical, Victorian, and Gothic architecture. This can be seen on the campus of Boston College, where merely a couple hundred feet apart stand Gasson Hall and O’Neill Library. Inscriptions, statues, and images ornament the former, a magnificent 200-foot Gothic-style tower, capped by a bell and four spires. In contrast, O’Neill Library’s repellent concrete pillars shamefully conceal the building itself, a sore thumb on a campus known for its beauty.

There are sociological factors as well. For much of human history prior to the 1960s, the beautiful was incentivized in social hierarchies — one was rewarded for being cultured, well-read, and well-adjusted to the beautiful works of antiquity and modernity. Artisans and architects were raised to the level of nobles. The Renaissance Humanistic movement of the 15th century, combined with the emergence of the printing press, produced a frenzy for beauty which would span the entire period until our time. Students studying abroad can see the relics of this past as they travel throughout Europe. Now, however, our cultural capital has become less “culture” and more “capital.” Physical assets, money, job titles, and social media followers are paramount to one’s social standing, rather than any form of knowledge.

The answer to renewing beauty in our culture may begin in the classroom. Aesthetic education teaches students to appreciate and create beautiful things. The subjects where beauty is studied and appreciated are generally considered the “humanities.” Studies in the humanities have a large bearing on one’s aesthetic sense. These are not novel ideas: In ancient times, St. Augustine defined virtue as ordo amoris (ordinate loves), Plato asserted that one comes to appreciate beauty itself by first being introduced to individual works of beauty, and Aristotle said that education should make students like and dislike what they ought.

It is therefore unsurprising that, as the aesthetic sense has waned, the number of students in college — where the aesthetic sense is historically developed and refined — studying the humanities has decreased. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, during the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has overall declined by seventeen percent. In tandem with this decrease has been a radical change in the humanities themselves: in an attempt to spark students’ interest, we engage with contemporary, “relevant” material rather than works which have been filtered through and survived a millennium of diverse cultures, beliefs, and intellects. If not the cause, this shift in focus certainly has not reversed the trend in the humanities. Rather than capitulating to pushes for more “socially acceptable” or “relevant material” in humanities classes, teachers have to give students the opportunity to encounter beautiful works they won’t likely be exposed to anywhere else. 

But why should we really care about appreciating beauty? The aesthetic sense has an immediate, practical impact on our sense of purpose and our attitude toward the world. One Boston College student, Nicholas Asher, was once a committed atheist. “I was a cynic,” he said, “and I didn’t understand what made humans special. And it hurt me — I had no reason to be happy.” I could see the recollection of anguish in his furrowed brow. “The change occurred one day when I decided to go to confession with my high school chaplain after class one day,” he continued, “Father would hold confession outside, in lawn chairs beside the lake. During the confession, I went on tangents, lamenting and complaining about my life and how God never showed himself to me. Eventually, Father did what no other priest has ever done to me. He said ‘Stop.’ We sat in silence for a moment. ‘Look at everything here: the water, the fountain, the ducks. Look at what God has given us.’” Nicholas continued, “I realized then that humans are special. We’re able to recognize the beauty of animals, but they have no awareness of it themselves. We’re able to be aware of that, and capture it, and make poetry, art, and music with it.”

Beauty brings out what is mostly uniquely human in us. Beauty allows us to transcend ourselves. This claim is lucidly presented in Sir Roger Scruton’s renowned BBC documentary, “Why Beauty Matters.” In it, he traces the recent history in which “our world has turned its back on beauty” and defends our need for it using practical wisdom. His fundamental claim is that beauty is a universal need of human beings; if we ignore this need, we find ourselves in a spiritual desert. 

And in a spiritual desert we find ourselves indeed. In the wise words of Dostoyevsky, “Beauty will save the world.”